I mean, really. It's not like slashdot prevents him from responding to these comments directly! But, no instead, he responds in a nice controlled environment of a follup interview! C'mon, Joel. Don't trust your point of view enough to defend it in person?
While that's true, I think that one of the best responses that I've seen to this so far has come from someone at LinuxToday He says:
frankly most Linux users don't care about your profit margin -- and *there're not supposed to*! It's up to you to make your business a success, not the community. If the community wants GPL'd stuff, then it's up to you to figure out how to make it profitable. If you can't...well, there's always barber college.
Finally, for many of us, using the GPL is as much a philosophical as a practical matter. RMS, whatever his faults, has been crystal-clear on this issue from Day 1. GPL'd software is first and foremost a way to make software Free. If software houses find it difficult to make a buck that way, that's not his problem. It's not our problem. It's *your* problem.
The point is, that while software developers need to eat, that's not the community's problem. If a software developer can't eat, and that developer licensed his/her code under the GPL, that's not the GPL's fault. Do we know why the software developer isn't eating? Is it because the GPL prevents it or is it because the software developer doesn't understand the GPL enough to be able to make proper use of it?
I would think that releasing code under the GPL, and then making it harder than normal for people to get that code, just invites the kind of extra effort to deal with the myriads of people requesting the source code. The fact that you wasted time answering all of those questions isn't a consequence of using the GPL. It's a consequence of trying to use the GPL in a non-standard, albeit completely legitimate, way. Unless you're microsoft, there's a penalty for not conforming to standards. Should you be surprised when chosing to do so actually costs you something? In this case, the cost was spending too much time arguing instead of charging money for some value added service.
I think it's a cop out to say that they didn't make money because of the GPL. I think it's a way of deflecting attention on what might be the real issue: a poorly managed business.
Just today I called up Earthlink to switch from my Time Warner Road Runner account to their competing service which exists entirely as a condition of the merger between the AOL & TW.
The Earthlink has a whole bunch of advantages of the RR account.
It's cheaper
It provides free, nationwide unlimited dialup
It allows me to run servers
It has no installation cost
and it will soon have reasonably priced static IP addresses (additional $15/mo for Earthlink vs additional $150/mo for RR!)
This is what competition does. I find it short sited that the government grants a monopoly to the cable company by not letting anyone else lay cable, but then doesn't turn around and enforce shared access! It's just luck that AOL/TW is being forced to open up their access.
In stating that binary code is not speech, I was simply remembering what I'd read when the finding came out stating that source code is speech. IIRC, it specifically said that source code is speech, but binary code is not.
I read the argument in your journal about financial liability for corporations and I'm not sure I buy it. You're essentially saying that purchasing a cheap product without a warranty is more expensive than purchasing an expensive product with a warranty, all other things equal.
That's not what I am saying at all. I don't support this idea. IMHO, it's flawed logic. However, that's the logic that already gets used in corporations all over the place. As a consultant, I can't tell you how often I've been told, straight in the face by an otherwise intelligent business owner, "We don't use that because there's no one to sue if we have a problem."
Business owners are willing to pay extra money for lowered liability. They're willing to go with a proprietary product today because they think it's a lower risk, even if it costs a ton more. I don't want to see a world in which a business owner can say, "there's no one to sue," and actually be correct. Right now you can simply say to that business owner, "Well actually there's no one to sue in any circumstance. Read your EULA." But if software liability becomes a law, open source/free software will suddenly become a business liability, since in that case there really is no one to sue.
Business owners are out there trying to manage the risks to their business. They're more than willing to pay handsomely for lowered risk. If it's suddenly a business risk to use open source/free software, I think that's a bad thing for open source/free software.
IANAL, but IIRC, source code has been found by the courts to be speech. Software liability will create a prior restraint on the expression of that speech. I don't think that any liability laws will be upheld in the courts for people who release source code. They can claim that it's simply the exercise of their 1st amendment rights.
But this will impact the distributions, who release software in binary form. I don't believe that binary code is considered speech. So the Red Hat's, SuSE's, Madrake's, Debian's of the world might be in trouble with their current distribution method. But probably not the authors.
All told, I still find the idea of software liability to be discomforting. Unless it can be done in such a way that it doesn't immediately disadvantage free/opensource software, either directly (by holding authors/distributors liable) or indirectly (by making free/opensource software a business liability since there's no one to sue), I think it's a really bad idea. See my journal entry for more details.
Therefore, only proprietary software vendors should be held liable for bugs in their software.
If this happens, we've codified into law, the current myth that already plagues open source/free software. That if something goes wrong with free/open source software, there's no one to sue. Thus there's a business liability in choosing free/open source software.
Right now this is a myth, and is completely untrue, because if something goes wrong with ANY software, there's no one to sue. I've been opposed to software liability in my/. sig for some time now. Here's a journal entry on software liability that I wrote. It has three comments. Unfortunately the comment period expired some time ago. But I think we still need to talk about how to do software liability without putting open source/free software at a disadvantage either directly or indirectly.
Perhaps a better way to ask it would be, "Why do midwesterners feel more comfortable with technology than northeasterners?"
I think Katz made too big of a leap when going from a person's opinion of themselves to their actual skills. However, I suspect that if you think you know technology, you probably have a leg up on someone who thinks they don't know technology. Someone in the latter group is not going to be driven to solve a problem. They're going to first think that they don't understand the constraints of the problem thus they can't possibly solve it. But someone who thinks that they know technology and experiences a problem with it, at the very least, is not going to be able to dismiss the problem as outside of the scope of their knowledge.
So for example, I'm not even going to know where to begin solving a problem that might occur on a 747 jet liner. I don't understand the systems involved. But I do understand how my 9-cell sabre 150 parachute works, and I can at least begin to troubleshoot any problems that I experience. Even if I don't really understand how to build one.
The point is that comfort with a system allows for people to become knowledgable about that system. So, you're right that comfort doesn't imply knowledge, but discomfort might imply lack of knowledge.
$.02
Re:Wasn't this already solved in the Sony case?
on
EFF Takes Bnetd Case
·
· Score: 2
The only remaining question is whether Blizzard applied for a patant for their network protocols. (unlikely.) If they did not, they do not own the IP of the protocol (since the protocol is a method and must be patented, not copyrighted) and therefore Bnetd is fully within their rights to publish it.
IANAL, but I think we can safely assume that the protocol is not patented. If it were patented, part of the patent application would be the requirement for full disclosure of the thing being patented. In other words the protocol specifications would have to be in the patent application and available for public viewing.
Thus there would be no need for reverse engineering the protocol.
But, I could be wrong, and it wouldn't surprise me.
Chiang said several anti-piracy strategies by software makers have panned out. For one thing, software makers now commonly make agreements with computer manufacturers to "bundle" software with new computers
Which of our favorite monopolies do you think will use this study to say that bundling provides customer benefit?
Am I off my rocker? Is there another way to interpret this that doesn't say that bundling provides customer benefit? Is this an endorsement of Microsoft's biz practices?
Really? Wow, whenever I want to buy something from thinkgeek, the first thing I do is reload/. a bunch of times until a thinkgeek ad comes up. Then I click on it and place my order. I do this specifically because I like/. and I want to see them generate some revenue.
Ok. But why is that effectively any different? A court can still order them to shut down the network by shutting down morpheus clients, Kazaa clients and grokster clients.
Paul Murphy has done a number of case studies on using Unix as a thin client, and the cost comparison between this and client/server windows. I've found these articles to be excellent. The case study that you might want to look at is here
He has a whole series of really great case studies here.
Microsoft also argued that the trial judge's role in approving the proposed settlement is "almost ministerial," and urged her to defer to the judgment of the Justice Department about whether the agreement "is the most appropriate mechanism to resolve the competing interests at stake." To do otherwise, the company argued, would risk constitutional questions over the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.
Someone want to explain to me exactly how there's a seperation of executive and judicial branches if the judicial branch is just supposed to bow to the executive branch by simply deferring to the judgement of the Justice Department? It would seem to me that questions over seperation of judicial and executive branches are only applicable if the judge follows this recommendation.
Am I missing something? We are talking about the US government in which there are 3 seperate branches of governement which act as checks and balances to one another, right? How does the one branch of government simply defering to the other provide any checks or balances?
I can't imagine the judge looking too fondly on this "suggestion". Am I way off base?
So, if you're not inclined to risk your child's limbs, you have something to gain from genetic screening.
While I am inclined not to risk my child's limbs, I'd rather risk my children's limbs than risk their lives. Your logic seems to suggest that in order to prevent my child from the penalties of a broken arm, I ought to just relieve them of their lives. That may be something that works for you, but not for me.
Is it not the parent's responsibility to give their offspring every positive chance in life they can get?
No, actually, it's not. I am a parent, and I would argue that it's my responsibility to let my children screw up as much as possible. Why? Because we as humans tend to learn through our mistakes, not our successes. By encouraging my childrens opportunities to make mistakes, they learn that daddy is not going to be around to fix their problems, so perhaps they'd better start thinking about how to fix the problems that they create for themselves.
Of course, there are limits to this. I'm not going to encourage my children to learn the consequences of playing in the street. So I won't encourage mistakes that risk damage to life and limb. But every other mistake that my child is about to walk into, I want as much as possible to stop myself from jumping in and rescuing them. That way they get an oppurtunity to recognize when they're walking into problems.
(The above is grossly over simplified, but it captures the essence. For more details see Parenting with Love and Logic)
The short of it is, there are innumerable diseases and afflictions that plague humanity that are passed through the genes. Most of them have no cures to date, and considering the money put into research these days, it's hard to remain optimistic that cures will ever be found.
The problem with this assumption is that you don't know what other things you're screening out when you screen out the disease. A somewhat contrived example of this is Stephen Hawking. Of course no really knows the cause of ALS, but suppose it turns out to be genetic. Stephen Hawking would have been screened out of existance, and consequently all of his contributions to science.
IMHO, by doing this kind of thing, we pretend that we are God and that we can forsee every possible future. In my opinion, this is foolishness. We are too focused on our inconveniences, and spend too much effort in the avoidance of struggle. We almost universally fail to see the good that can come out of those struggles.
We'll create a better class of geeks! Or at least ones with 6 fingers (better keyboarding) or a mousing hand or something.
Geez, if we're going to create a better class of geek, let's at least give him 2^n fingers. So 4 fingers or 8 fingers (per hand) and how much easier does counting in binary get for this person?
Do you want Congress passing laws about the content of e-mail??
The previous poster is not suggesting that congress pass laws about the content of email. He/she is suggesting that the beneficiary of spam be accountable for damages done through the sending of spam. So for example, if I set up an email account for my pre-teen son, and that email account starts getting lots of SPAM for porn sites, I should then be able to sue the porn sites who have attempted to benefit through the use of spam. Nobody's governing what can and can't be said, but someone does have to take responsibility for saying dumb stuff.
The idea is this: skip the middle man (the spammers) and go after the people who reap financial benefit - the sites/services/etc being advertised. If there's an additional cost to spam then perhaps the demand will dry up.
It's an interesting idea and I wonder if there are other implications that I can't think of.
I'm arguing whether it really produces a good quality of life for everyone.
Yes, but you're arguing it by using an example that is exceedingly rare: a family that is entirely outside of the economy suddenly and unexpectedly trying to get into it. Ok. So the increase in the GDP does not impact that family. But they're outside of the thing that the GDP measures. Why would you expect it to impact them?
What's more interesting is an example of a family which participates in the economy and the reactions to their lives that the economy has. Of course, you're always going to find at least one family for which an increase in the GDP does not have positive impact. And you're always going to find at least one family for which a decrease in the GDP does not have a negative impact. That doesn't mean that you get to say that an increase in the GDP negatively impacts everyone (or vice versa).
True enough. But I would suggest that the problem there stems from the original isolation of the family. They built for themselves a private economy the depended entirely upon the work of the father. When the father could no longer work, the private economy failed. It should not be surprising that it would take some time/effort/adjustment for a completely private economy's work to be translated into something that represents work in a larger, and different economy.
In particular, the output of a single family farm, while actually being a lot of work, does not represent a lot of work in an economy that has produced hugely efficient farms. So you're example, while true represents things on an unfair scale. It takes work which is highly valuable in one economy and tries to assess its value in another economy.
The GDP of the larger economy goes up, while the GDP of the smaller economy gets eliminated. And the GDP of the larger economy increases less than the GDP of the smaller economy. But that's only because the larger economy doesn't see the work that's being done as valuable, and can get the same output somewhere else for cheaper.
Economics produces efficiency. If you refuse to partake in that economy, then you should not be surprised if the work that you do is not as valuable in that economy.
It's not the swapping of the tree and the cow that grows us economically. It's the work that gets done (measured by the presence of the tree) that grows us economically. If the cow is relatively rare, and trees are relatively prevalant. Then the amount of work that gets done in collecting a tree is not much, and I'm not likely to swap my cow for it. The cow represents a lot more work to acquire, and if I really need a tree it'd be less work to just go and get one myself. But if the cow and the tree represent more or less equal amounts of work, then you and I might agree to the exchange based on our needs at the time.
The point is that economic growth does not come from the cow and the tree themselves. It comes from what those things represent: work. So we can't keep on swapping the tree back and forth in order to grow economically. No additional work is getting done. In order to grow econmically, work must be done. In the larger national economy that's what happens. Work gets done in order to facilitate all of the swapping that you see. In the larger economy, we've develeped a system of representing universally interchangeable work. We call it money. Money, in and of itself, is basically worthless. But since money can only be legally acquired through legitmate work, money allows me to offer some of my already completed work to you, in exchange for something you have, even though you might not need the work that I do.
So we're not just incessantly swapping stuff back and forth. WE had to work to acquire money which allows us to participate in the swapping.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, really. It's not like slashdot prevents him from responding to these comments directly! But, no instead, he responds in a nice controlled environment of a follup interview! C'mon, Joel. Don't trust your point of view enough to defend it in person?
While that's true, I think that one of the best responses that I've seen to this so far has come from someone at LinuxToday He says:
The point is, that while software developers need to eat, that's not the community's problem. If a software developer can't eat, and that developer licensed his/her code under the GPL, that's not the GPL's fault. Do we know why the software developer isn't eating? Is it because the GPL prevents it or is it because the software developer doesn't understand the GPL enough to be able to make proper use of it?
I would think that releasing code under the GPL, and then making it harder than normal for people to get that code, just invites the kind of extra effort to deal with the myriads of people requesting the source code. The fact that you wasted time answering all of those questions isn't a consequence of using the GPL. It's a consequence of trying to use the GPL in a non-standard, albeit completely legitimate, way. Unless you're microsoft, there's a penalty for not conforming to standards. Should you be surprised when chosing to do so actually costs you something? In this case, the cost was spending too much time arguing instead of charging money for some value added service.
I think it's a cop out to say that they didn't make money because of the GPL. I think it's a way of deflecting attention on what might be the real issue: a poorly managed business.
TW RR in Charlotte is $44.95/mo.
Where do you get $8/mo hosting?
The Earthlink has a whole bunch of advantages of the RR account.
This is what competition does. I find it short sited that the government grants a monopoly to the cable company by not letting anyone else lay cable, but then doesn't turn around and enforce shared access! It's just luck that AOL/TW is being forced to open up their access.
That's not what I am saying at all. I don't support this idea. IMHO, it's flawed logic. However, that's the logic that already gets used in corporations all over the place. As a consultant, I can't tell you how often I've been told, straight in the face by an otherwise intelligent business owner, "We don't use that because there's no one to sue if we have a problem."
Business owners are willing to pay extra money for lowered liability. They're willing to go with a proprietary product today because they think it's a lower risk, even if it costs a ton more. I don't want to see a world in which a business owner can say, "there's no one to sue," and actually be correct. Right now you can simply say to that business owner, "Well actually there's no one to sue in any circumstance. Read your EULA." But if software liability becomes a law, open source/free software will suddenly become a business liability, since in that case there really is no one to sue.
Business owners are out there trying to manage the risks to their business. They're more than willing to pay handsomely for lowered risk. If it's suddenly a business risk to use open source/free software, I think that's a bad thing for open source/free software.
IANAL, but IIRC, source code has been found by the courts to be speech. Software liability will create a prior restraint on the expression of that speech. I don't think that any liability laws will be upheld in the courts for people who release source code. They can claim that it's simply the exercise of their 1st amendment rights.
But this will impact the distributions, who release software in binary form. I don't believe that binary code is considered speech. So the Red Hat's, SuSE's, Madrake's, Debian's of the world might be in trouble with their current distribution method. But probably not the authors.
All told, I still find the idea of software liability to be discomforting. Unless it can be done in such a way that it doesn't immediately disadvantage free/opensource software, either directly (by holding authors/distributors liable) or indirectly (by making free/opensource software a business liability since there's no one to sue), I think it's a really bad idea. See my journal entry for more details.
If this happens, we've codified into law, the current myth that already plagues open source/free software. That if something goes wrong with free/open source software, there's no one to sue. Thus there's a business liability in choosing free/open source software.
Right now this is a myth, and is completely untrue, because if something goes wrong with ANY software, there's no one to sue. I've been opposed to software liability in my /. sig for some time now. Here's a journal entry on software liability that I wrote. It has three comments. Unfortunately the comment period expired some time ago. But I think we still need to talk about how to do software liability without putting open source/free software at a disadvantage either directly or indirectly.
Well, that depends on what you're asking. Do I need to worry that the 747 is fixed? Yes. Do I need to worry about doing it? No.
Perhaps a better way to ask it would be, "Why do midwesterners feel more comfortable with technology than northeasterners?"
I think Katz made too big of a leap when going from a person's opinion of themselves to their actual skills. However, I suspect that if you think you know technology, you probably have a leg up on someone who thinks they don't know technology. Someone in the latter group is not going to be driven to solve a problem. They're going to first think that they don't understand the constraints of the problem thus they can't possibly solve it. But someone who thinks that they know technology and experiences a problem with it, at the very least, is not going to be able to dismiss the problem as outside of the scope of their knowledge.
So for example, I'm not even going to know where to begin solving a problem that might occur on a 747 jet liner. I don't understand the systems involved. But I do understand how my 9-cell sabre 150 parachute works, and I can at least begin to troubleshoot any problems that I experience. Even if I don't really understand how to build one.
The point is that comfort with a system allows for people to become knowledgable about that system. So, you're right that comfort doesn't imply knowledge, but discomfort might imply lack of knowledge.
$.02
IANAL, but I think we can safely assume that the protocol is not patented. If it were patented, part of the patent application would be the requirement for full disclosure of the thing being patented. In other words the protocol specifications would have to be in the patent application and available for public viewing.
Thus there would be no need for reverse engineering the protocol.
But, I could be wrong, and it wouldn't surprise me.
Which of our favorite monopolies do you think will use this study to say that bundling provides customer benefit?
Am I off my rocker? Is there another way to interpret this that doesn't say that bundling provides customer benefit? Is this an endorsement of Microsoft's biz practices?
Really? Wow, whenever I want to buy something from thinkgeek, the first thing I do is reload /. a bunch of times until a thinkgeek ad comes up. Then I click on it and place my order. I do this specifically because I like /. and I want to see them generate some revenue.
Ok. But why is that effectively any different? A court can still order them to shut down the network by shutting down morpheus clients, Kazaa clients and grokster clients.
He has a whole series of really great case studies here.
Someone want to explain to me exactly how there's a seperation of executive and judicial branches if the judicial branch is just supposed to bow to the executive branch by simply deferring to the judgement of the Justice Department? It would seem to me that questions over seperation of judicial and executive branches are only applicable if the judge follows this recommendation.
Am I missing something? We are talking about the US government in which there are 3 seperate branches of governement which act as checks and balances to one another, right? How does the one branch of government simply defering to the other provide any checks or balances?
I can't imagine the judge looking too fondly on this "suggestion". Am I way off base?
Is yahoo modifying the results so that their customer's searches appear near the top?
Ok. I've gone to the web to try and figure out what your tagline means. I haven't found any useful description yet.
Care to share?
Exactly. Heck the trial record specifically referenced Netscape, which was based in California, which IIRC is still one of the dissenting states.
While I am inclined not to risk my child's limbs, I'd rather risk my children's limbs than risk their lives. Your logic seems to suggest that in order to prevent my child from the penalties of a broken arm, I ought to just relieve them of their lives. That may be something that works for you, but not for me.
No, actually, it's not. I am a parent, and I would argue that it's my responsibility to let my children screw up as much as possible. Why? Because we as humans tend to learn through our mistakes, not our successes. By encouraging my childrens opportunities to make mistakes, they learn that daddy is not going to be around to fix their problems, so perhaps they'd better start thinking about how to fix the problems that they create for themselves.
Of course, there are limits to this. I'm not going to encourage my children to learn the consequences of playing in the street. So I won't encourage mistakes that risk damage to life and limb. But every other mistake that my child is about to walk into, I want as much as possible to stop myself from jumping in and rescuing them. That way they get an oppurtunity to recognize when they're walking into problems.
(The above is grossly over simplified, but it captures the essence. For more details see Parenting with Love and Logic)
The problem with this assumption is that you don't know what other things you're screening out when you screen out the disease. A somewhat contrived example of this is Stephen Hawking. Of course no really knows the cause of ALS, but suppose it turns out to be genetic. Stephen Hawking would have been screened out of existance, and consequently all of his contributions to science.
IMHO, by doing this kind of thing, we pretend that we are God and that we can forsee every possible future. In my opinion, this is foolishness. We are too focused on our inconveniences, and spend too much effort in the avoidance of struggle. We almost universally fail to see the good that can come out of those struggles.
The previous poster is not suggesting that congress pass laws about the content of email. He/she is suggesting that the beneficiary of spam be accountable for damages done through the sending of spam. So for example, if I set up an email account for my pre-teen son, and that email account starts getting lots of SPAM for porn sites, I should then be able to sue the porn sites who have attempted to benefit through the use of spam. Nobody's governing what can and can't be said, but someone does have to take responsibility for saying dumb stuff.
The idea is this: skip the middle man (the spammers) and go after the people who reap financial benefit - the sites/services/etc being advertised. If there's an additional cost to spam then perhaps the demand will dry up.
It's an interesting idea and I wonder if there are other implications that I can't think of.
Yes, but you're arguing it by using an example that is exceedingly rare: a family that is entirely outside of the economy suddenly and unexpectedly trying to get into it. Ok. So the increase in the GDP does not impact that family. But they're outside of the thing that the GDP measures. Why would you expect it to impact them?
What's more interesting is an example of a family which participates in the economy and the reactions to their lives that the economy has. Of course, you're always going to find at least one family for which an increase in the GDP does not have positive impact. And you're always going to find at least one family for which a decrease in the GDP does not have a negative impact. That doesn't mean that you get to say that an increase in the GDP negatively impacts everyone (or vice versa).
True enough. But I would suggest that the problem there stems from the original isolation of the family. They built for themselves a private economy the depended entirely upon the work of the father. When the father could no longer work, the private economy failed. It should not be surprising that it would take some time/effort/adjustment for a completely private economy's work to be translated into something that represents work in a larger, and different economy.
In particular, the output of a single family farm, while actually being a lot of work, does not represent a lot of work in an economy that has produced hugely efficient farms. So you're example, while true represents things on an unfair scale. It takes work which is highly valuable in one economy and tries to assess its value in another economy.
The GDP of the larger economy goes up, while the GDP of the smaller economy gets eliminated. And the GDP of the larger economy increases less than the GDP of the smaller economy. But that's only because the larger economy doesn't see the work that's being done as valuable, and can get the same output somewhere else for cheaper.
Economics produces efficiency. If you refuse to partake in that economy, then you should not be surprised if the work that you do is not as valuable in that economy.
It's not the swapping of the tree and the cow that grows us economically. It's the work that gets done (measured by the presence of the tree) that grows us economically. If the cow is relatively rare, and trees are relatively prevalant. Then the amount of work that gets done in collecting a tree is not much, and I'm not likely to swap my cow for it. The cow represents a lot more work to acquire, and if I really need a tree it'd be less work to just go and get one myself. But if the cow and the tree represent more or less equal amounts of work, then you and I might agree to the exchange based on our needs at the time.
The point is that economic growth does not come from the cow and the tree themselves. It comes from what those things represent: work. So we can't keep on swapping the tree back and forth in order to grow economically. No additional work is getting done. In order to grow econmically, work must be done. In the larger national economy that's what happens. Work gets done in order to facilitate all of the swapping that you see. In the larger economy, we've develeped a system of representing universally interchangeable work. We call it money. Money, in and of itself, is basically worthless. But since money can only be legally acquired through legitmate work, money allows me to offer some of my already completed work to you, in exchange for something you have, even though you might not need the work that I do.
So we're not just incessantly swapping stuff back and forth. WE had to work to acquire money which allows us to participate in the swapping.